The fiscal year is just flying by. Once again we're celebrating with the best of the previous 13 weeks here at 90ways. And this time -- for the first time -- there's prize money involved.

To This Day

Elyne Kahn

"You wanna know what I think?" Mr. James is responding with vigor. "You wanna know what I think?" I hold my breath.

Mr. James is tall, and has conspicuously lost a number of his teeth, and speaks with a thick New Orleans accent. In early October of last year he, his wife, and their teenage son moved into Renaissance Village -- a 559 unit FEMA trailer park in Baker, Louisiana that is home to nearly two thousand Katrina evacuees, mostly from New Orleans. Soon afterwards Mr. James was appointed as vice president of the Renaissance Village Residents Advisory Council, a self-selected and ever-diminishing group with the explicit aim of representing the residents of the trailer park mostly in dealings with FEMA, on-site security, and Keta -- the company contracted by FEMA to directly manage the site. He is a patient man, though appropriately displays his frustration when he feels people are being treated unfairly, and now, as he addresses a group of donors, his emotional speech is accompanied by large movements of his arms, and steadily increasing volume in his voice. Mr. James is not the most articulate person, but his point is clear: FEMA is reneging on promises made, in writing, when the residents moved into the trailer park.

It is a question from one donor -- a well-dressed woman, possibly holding a camera with which to capture her historic trip -- that has Mr. James responding so vigorously. She asks Mr. James why he believes FEMA defaulted on its promise to provide the residents with free propane. (Each individual trailer has two propane tanks, used for both heating and cooking.) Something about the way the question is asked makes me nervous. The woman seems eager for Mr. James to misspeak, to declare himself a victim. I respect Mr. James, and I respect the plight of the residents, and I don't want him to say anything that will harm his and their credibility in an uphill fight for basic rights.

*

When I first visited the site, Renaissance Village had been occupied for three weeks. I was escorted by a Catholic nun who began assisting many of the evacuees as soon as they started to arrive in Baton Rouge. Even though the sister had been coming once or twice a day since the village opened, we were stopped by security guards at the front gate. Following an exchange of photo IDs, we drove on. I was uncomfortable in my inability to make sense of what I was seeing: row after row after row of stark white trailers crammed onto a vast dusty lot. (To this day, I feel the need to take a shower every time I leave Renaissance Village. The dust hangs in the air and I leave with an uncomfortable film over my entire body. I am fortunate to have an unpolluted place to go and clean myself, not to mention breathe. When it rains, the entire site turns to a mud pit.) This was not a community. This was a slap in the face on a community scale. Even the name "Renaissance Village" is a slap in the face considering the unequivocally dismal nature of this place.

We came to what seemed to be the center of the village. The community buildings consisted of, in their entirety, a food service trailer that did not have a space to sit and eat a meal, only a facility to pick up meals; and a decrepit, leaky tent. At the time of our visit, the tent was home to the "school", which served, and continues to serve, about ten kids, each of whose parents, for various reasons, have decided that their children will not be integrated into a local public school this year. This leaves them with two dedicated, but uncertified, teachers, and not much else. It was not cold or rainy on the day of our visit, which was good news for the children. (Eventually, the Louisiana winter made for an impossible learning environment in the tent, and after a library trailer was installed the classes were moved there.)

About three months ago the original tent was replaced by a somewhat less leaky, somewhat larger tent, generously provided by the donors making up Mr. James's audience. The food service trailer is scheduled to close on 6 April. However, there is now a public library trailer, containing about ten computers and about ten books. Three larger trailers, intended for use by social service organizations and early childcare programs, sit unassembled near the front gate, just inside the chain link fence. They have been there since mid-December, targets for rocks thrown by the many children who live on site.

We walked to the basketball court, an unlit concrete pad with six hoops. At night it is dominated by young men. Younger kids orbit the periphery on donated bicycles, crashing into each other, throwing rocks, taunting, posturing aggressively. This is the extent of recreational space at Renaissance Village. One donor proposed and offered to pay for a playground, but no one was willing to accept liability, so it was never built. Across the ditch from the court is a depressingly small wooded picnic area, also unlit. Part of it has been cordoned off for some time by yellow caution tape.

Elsewhere, the site is blanketed by the campers that people call home. It's as if someone acquired this plot of land -- once a cow pasture -- and decided to install as many trailers as could possibly fit, without any regard for what it might actually be like to live here. The one thing that indicates even a whit of planning is the fact that every once in a while rows of trailers are interrupted by a small building containing a few washing machines and a few dryers.

I continue to visit Renaissance Village several times a week. Though my official work there is with the kids, I have had extensive interaction with parents and other residents. There are days when I leave the trailer park smiling, when I've seen how resilient some people are, even through such persistent suffering.

But for the most part I leave feeling severely discouraged, because even six months after the storm, progress is not being made. The residents of Renaissance Village are no closer to recovery than they were when they evacuated their homes. And the people who put them here are doing nothing to aid in that process.

Most people came to the trailer park from impromptu shelters in Baton Rouge, one of which housed six thousand evacuees. Although the prospect of living in a trailer at such a site was clearly not ideal, and certainly a far cry from the neighborhoods that were left behind in the Crescent City, I think in most cases people were initially excited to be getting a trailer. It would mean that they would be out of the shelters, and that, ostensibly, they'd have at least their basic needs taken care of by the federal government for eighteen months, after which the expectation was that they would be back on their feet enough to secure their own housing, whether back in New Orleans, or perhaps here in Baton Rouge.

When registering for a trailer, each family, or couple, or individual was designated a one-person trailer, or a two-person trailer, etc. based upon how many people would be moving in. This was a joke. In reality, all of the trailers on site, while of slightly varying size, are weekend campers. They are not homes, even for one or two people, let alone families with three, four, even five children. (It is rumored that some of the more cunning parents deliberately augmented the number of children that would be living with them. If nothing else, this made difficult the determination of accurate demographic data that could later be used by social service providers, law enforcement officials, and others.)

Once they had moved in, residents isolated themselves. Shades are drawn in every trailer. Unlike in the communities that they left behind, people don't know their neighbors. At night the knives come out, the guns come out. People have reason to be scared, and to be scared for their children. But even in the day, there is no sense of community here, unless it is imposed by visitors offering arts and crafts or games. Only the kids seem to have a community, and it is a frightening one. In the absence of adult supervision they create their own code of conduct, defined by foul language, vicious pecking orders and, I suspect, unfettered sexual exploration.

The elderly and disabled are perhaps in the worst situation of anyone here. Trailers are not handicap accessible. In some cases, wheelchairs sit outside the doors of trailers while their owners are stranded inside. Some people interact only with the employees of the food service trailer who deliver meals to mobility-impaired individuals. At least one resident who had expired was not discovered until a few days after the fact.

The situation is not getting better, and there is reason to be very concerned. Services are not effectively provided to residents. In many cases service providers cannot even get through the gates. It is likely that in a few months (specifically, nine months from when many evacuees were residing in shelters) we will see a number of new residents at Renaissance Village. If the current patterns continue, they will not receive adequate neonatal care. According to security guards, domestic violence has been fairly widespread since people first arrived. Suicides are not yet a problem at the trailer park, but it seems only a matter of time.

The stark, crowded trailers; the isolation; the lack of community structures and basic services; the chain-link -- all of it makes the air in Renaissance Village, already thick with dust, heavy with friction and frustration. Even when it rains, the entire park feels combustible.

*

Could the lack of propane be the spark that will ignite this tinderbox?

These days, at the weekly community meetings, Mr. James coaches residents on how to conserve propane, and advises them to save their receipts, in hopes that one day soon the battle will be won and FEMA will reimburse residents for the fuel that they have purchased.

And now, despite my concerns, Mr. James's voice becomes more even. "You wanna know what I think? I think FEMA ran out of money," he says. "I think FEMA didn't have any idea how much it was gonna cost to give propane to every person here, and they ran out of money." I breathe again. Mr. James has indeed made a thoughtful -- and probably accurate -- assessment of the propane situation. But has anyone else given it any thought? The trailer park is not yet a third of the way into its intended lifetime, and FEMA is already denying essential amenities in order to cut expenses. Has anyone considered what the cost will be of not providing propane?